


The Jade Dragon

by Firerose



Category: Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre: Case Fic, Future Fic, Original Character-centric, The Other Wind, Work In Progress, hard-boiled
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-11-12
Updated: 2012-06-02
Packaged: 2017-10-25 23:30:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/276049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Firerose/pseuds/Firerose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Havnor City, the largest city in the world</i>... It's nearly 200 years since Lebannen came to the throne and his kingdom's on the brink of disaster. The king's mad, his heir's missing and when newly reinstated Officer Bittern investigates, he soon starts tripping over corpses</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Missing Prince

**Author's Note:**

> This novel-in-progress owes almost as much of a debt to Raymond Chandler as it does to Ursula Le Guin. I thank Jay Tryfanstone, Miss Morland & Northland for advice & editing. All infelicities are my own.

**I: The Missing Prince**

 _The first thing I noticed that night, the night this whole mess started, was that the chief looked exhausted, even more exhausted than I felt. ‘Bittern,’ he said. That’s my name all right. ‘Good,’ he said. And that’s where he went wrong. Nothing good ever started from being woken in the middle of the night by a couple of goons and dragged up to the palace for questioning. Nothing good ever came from trusting Bittern to save the day. And this damn case was no exception._

 _Never work with dames or pocks, my old man used to say, and if he didn’t bother to slap dragons on the list it was because they no more existed than the Nameday Fairy. Now I’m expecting her to come tap-tap-tapping at my office door with some damn fool tale of missing presents and oh, by the way, the end of the world._

 _But back then I didn’t know any of that. Back then I barely knew anything at all. Back then I was dumb enough to be glad it was the chief on the far side of the table and not some jumped-up punk who figured a beak like mine was just begging to be broken…_

‘Bittern,’ said the chief. ‘Good. Sit down. What took you so long?’

I pulled up a chair in the pool of magelight and tipped the thing back as nonchalantly as I could manage with the light playing silly buggers with my eyes. It wouldn’t fool the chief for an instant but it might annoy his sidekicks, and they were the kind of guys it was a pleasure to annoy. ‘I was in bed,’ I said. It was true and the chief always liked truth.

The chief waved his men out. ‘Just after midnight? I hope she was pretty.’ He didn’t illustrate the point with his hands the way most men would. The chief wasn’t like that. He lived for his job. He never made small talk. Which was why this conversation was making about as much sense as a bunch of red roses on a stall down the fish market.

‘In bed and asleep.’ That was true too. There wasn’t a broad in the city with bad enough taste to go for a guy like me, unless she wanted something besides the obvious. And that’s where I drew the line. My talents were for hire, sure, but payment in anything but gold or ivory was strictly by negotiation.

‘I thought you’d given up on sleep, gone for hazia-root.’

‘I’m clean. Been clean for months now.’ Actually it was two years and change, but a man’s drug habits were nobody’s business but his own.

‘You mean you’ve run out of cash, and no-one but a fool would give a man like you credit.’

‘You didn’t have two of your finest haul me out of bed gone midnight and drag me up here to hash over old times, Sedge.’ If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought he was sounding me out for a job. But the chief hated drugs. He’d sworn he’d never give me work again, and he never went back on his word. ‘Get to the point, if there is one, or I’m off back to bed.’ I sat up straight and scraped my chair across the stone floor to show I meant business. But he’d hooked me by then. I wouldn’t have left even if the two goons hadn’t still been standing right outside the door.

The chief looked at me then, right at me, the way folk rarely bother to do with a washed-up old wreck like me. He looked even wearier than before, wearier than a man with a conscience as clean as his had any right to look. Then he nodded, just the once. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘There’s a case. You’ll know soon enough. The entire city will know. The prince has gone missing.’

‘He’ll be out partying somewhere,’ I said. ‘Home before daylight. Even you must remember what being a student—’

‘No, really missing. The Ministry swears he’s alive, but there’s no trace of him anywhere.’

‘No trace of him in the city?’

‘No trace of him in all of Earthsea.’

‘You’re joking,’ I said, but he shook his head, and anyway, the chief never joked. ‘That’s impossible.’

‘Apparently not.’

‘They’re having you on. And I thought those Ministry flunkies had no sense of humour—’

‘That’s what I thought at first. But they’ve sworn by their true names he simply isn’t showing up anywhere. I know terrified men when I see them, and they were terrified.’

‘What’s it to me?’

‘The king’s asked for you. By name.’

‘I’m surprised he’s remembered it.’ Frankly I was surprised he’d remembered anything.

‘You made an impression on him.’

‘What’s it to me?’ I repeated. I’d have tipped the chair back again but I didn’t fancy what all that cold stone on the floor might do to the back of my head.

‘Have you no loyalty left?’ He made a little clenching move with his hand and if it’d been anybody but the chief my nose would have been history, for sure. ‘Does the fact the king has asked for your help – begged for it, actually – mean _nothing_ to you?’ He said it as if he was genuinely baffled. ‘You swore an oath once, Bittern.’

‘You threw me onto the fucking street!’

‘I could overlook you coming in late. I could even overlook you not turning up at all. For days. Weeks. But to turn up at headquarters spaced out of your head on that bloody root!’ The chief never swore. ‘What did you expect me to do!’

The man had a point. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So I swore an oath once.’

‘Do you need me to remind you that your oath can only be rescinded by death?’

‘Is that a threat?’

‘Fuck you, Bittern, I’m offering you your old job back! All the usual terms. At least until the prince is found.’

The chief pushed the familiar silver badge across the table towards me. The rowan flanked by arrows beneath the crown. I rubbed my thumb back and forth over the branches a few times and then pinned the damned thing to my cloak. And that was it. I was a City of Havnor Officer of the Peace again.


	2. The Ice Maiden

My new boss handed me a miniature of an olive-skinned kid with a long narrow nose and the solemn expression of a goat cornered in a flowerbed. ‘This is the best picture of the prince we’ve been able to find,’ he said. I’d never clapped eyes on the prince but his ugly mug had frowned up at me from countless plates of corn chips at the Crown & Anchor down the docks. ‘The king is … indisposed, but the royal princess has condescended to grant you an immediate audience. My lieutenant will give you all the details, not that there are very many. Good luck.’ The chief slapped me on the back, and excused himself hastily. I didn’t blame him. He had a lot on his mind, and interviewing Princess Coral wasn’t likely to come up with any leads, not any fresh ones at least.

The lieutenant was new since my time. The thing the chief hadn’t said was that he was a broad. That was new since my time too. Not broads on the force, somebody had to make all the tea and file all the paperwork and comfort all the grieving widows. Making lieutenants out of them. She was young and sour and mannish with an accent as scratchy as an old biddy’s paper doily and a figure like one of those fake ivory table lamps that kind of old biddy collects, curves in all the wrong places. She was also so far out of her depth she could have been walking along the seabed, and if the dame didn’t wise up quick, she soon would be. She did manage to use that lah-di-dah voice of hers to fill me in on time and place – last logged just gone fourth hour in some backstreet near the university whose inhabitants were no doubt enjoying their late night visit from the CHOPs quite as much as I had – and she handed over a letter signed by the king. On the face of it, the paper gave me royal authority to go anywhere, talk to anyone and requisition anything at will. I tucked it in my belt pouch. Might come in handy, though these things often came with a catch. In this case, the catch might as well have been printed across the top in flashing mageletters. Not even I was dumb enough to say it out loud, but everybody knew the king was as mad as a spring salmon all the year round. On the whole I preferred to put my trust in the ten in ivory she doled out as an advance on my wages.

A pair of pageboys turned up to cut short the woman’s blathering. They were as alike as if they’d been ordered as a matched set. They probably had. The audience chamber they showed me into had probably looked more impressive before all the gold leaf on the grapes and scrolls and assorted twiddly bits had been stripped off by some contractor in too much of a hurry to bother about scratching the plasterwork. Then the duo folded away part of the wall and I realised I was just standing in some piddling antechamber. The real hall had been put together to impress folk a darned sight harder to impress than me, and the man who’d done it had known his business. The princess was sitting in a window seat on the far side of the room, across a couple of miles of marble inlay. The nails in my boots made quite a racket as I trekked across the stuff.

When I got close enough to make her out, I saw that the princess was one of those women for whom men killed. In my experience, they came in two kinds: the ones who lived to make men bend to their will, and the ones who stood like stone while the world burned around them. So, was the princess a manipulator or a statue? The longer I stood there waiting for her to move a muscle the more I leaned towards statue. From the scraps of royal protocol that’d stuck in my head, sneaking a peek was a lot less likely to book you a one-way ticket to the Reaches than getting the first word in, so I made the most of the opportunity to look her up and down. I was heading southwards from the slender neck when the statue spoke.

‘Officer … Bittern, I believe.’ Her subtle emphasis on my rank suggested she knew just how long the shiny badge had been hanging from my cloak – that and the slight secretive smile that crept into the corners of her generous lips. It was certainly no welcome mat. ‘How might I assist you in your investigation?’

I’d wondered that myself. When the number one suspect was a princess, you could hardly ask whether they’d popped their little brother into an oubliette. I settled for a bland, ‘When did you last see the prince your brother?’

‘At his nameday celebration.’ That was three weeks ago. There’d been street parties for five days to mark the prince turning thirteen. My neighbours had roasted a pig and invited me to share the feast. It was the last time I’d eaten meat. ‘We are not close, Anthar and I.’ She pronounced the prince’s Kargish name with a hard ‘t’, which lent the word an unfamiliar tint. ‘Two decades is quite a barrier to familial intimacy, and the boy takes his studies commendably seriously.’

‘He still keeps quarters in the palace?’

‘Of course, in the Old Quadrangle, adjacent to the king my father’s rooms. A servant will take you there should you wish to examine them. But I believe he usually chooses to sleep in the university dormitory.’

‘With his friends?’

‘I know nothing of his present associates. The Chamberlain’s Office will be able to give you a list of all the noble families who have resided at court recently.’

I pulled out the miniature the chief had given me. ‘This a recent likeness?’

She glanced at it. ‘It’s a copy of the nameday portrait my father commissioned.’

‘Is it accurate?’

‘It’s a recognisable likeness. Somewhat flattering, as is the custom with such portraits.’

‘Flattering?’

‘Anthar is rather … paler than that portrays.’ She reached up one perfectly moulded arm to adjust the comb in her hair. It was the first time she’d stirred. Her skin in the lamplight was the colour of ripe chestnuts. ‘Is there anything else, officer?’

‘Not for now.’ I took my leave. ‘Just one thing,’ I said, turning back as the pageboys were opening the door. ‘Prince Malachite. Is he at court?’ If the princess was my number one suspect, her young nephew came in at number two.

‘I believe he is.’ The trick of projecting the voice effortlessly across airy chambers was clearly right next to sitting for hours as if carved from stone on the curriculum at princess school. ‘As I said,’ she continued, ‘the Lord Chamberlain’s staff will be able to assist you with whatever you should need. Goodnight, officer.’

I hadn’t put a dent in the princess’s serenity. I hadn’t expected to. But she had given me something, more in the words she’d left out than in those she’d put in. The prince. My brother. My father’s son. The heir to the throne. Even the Hardic form of the prince’s name: Hope. The princess had no intention of letting Lebannen VII ascend to the throne of their forefathers. And, more to the point, she didn’t give a flying fuck who knew it. Even when the kid had disappeared into the mists of Havnor City. Either she had nothing whatsoever to do with the abduction, if abduction it was, or else she had some very powerful protectors.

I figured I’d better look in on the prince’s quarters while I was here. Save another trip up the hill if the princess turned out to have been wrong about where her only brother was spending his nights. They’d have been searched already, of course, but the beat CHOPs were paid to have no imagination. That’s why they needed me. All that guff the chief had spouted about the king’s command was just that, guff. He’d never have handed me back my badge if he didn’t trust me to do something useful with it. Trouble was, in a case like this, he might well turn out to have a use for a fall-guy, or a corpse. Or both, my tired brain insisted on adding. At least the city would pay for my funeral, either way.

The security round the Old Quad was impressive. Even with the princess’s twins dogging my every step, my royal pass was looking decidedly crumpled and not a little grubby before I made it to the main gate. And there, not even a letter signed by the king himself was enough to save me from a weapons search by a Finder, and an accredited one at that. No doubt every other Accredited Finder in the city, and by first light half the bloody island, must have hit the streets doing whatever it was that Finders did. All the unaccredited ones would be out trying their luck as well: a quick route to accreditation if one’s luck proved good—not to mention yet another motive. The corridor off which the king slept, or paced, or ranted, was so packed with palace guards I felt a bit like a spring salmon myself. The chief must have remembered just how much I hated crowds. He’d left orders that the prince’s rooms were to be sealed, and Officer Bittern was to be allowed in alone. All it took was a drop of blood on some new-fangled device out of the Ministry of Names, all whirring brass cogs and winking coloured lights, ‘just to confirm your identity, sir,’ and I was in.

In wasn’t what I’d expected. For a start the ceiling was low enough I kept ducking at all the beams. There was more furniture per square foot of polished oak floor than anywhere I’d ever set foot in before. It reminded me of one of those little antiques and collectibles places in the River Quarter, you know the sort I mean. One of those shops where a guy like me wandering in off the street would get the proprietor sending his boy for the nearest CHOP. It was the kind of room that would have been gloomy if it hadn’t been for all the magelights and would have been dusty if it hadn’t been for all the servants. As it was, everything was polished to such a shine that the light bounced round and round and round like a bat trapped in a room with a candle. It was enough to make a man’s eyes cross even if he hadn’t been woken in the middle of the night by a couple of goons.

I plopped myself down on the nearest couch and sucked my finger till it stopped threatening to add little brown polka dots to the striped cream on cream silk. Not the colour scheme I’d have picked out for a thirteen year old boy, but what did I know, I’d never had kids. None that anybody had bothered telling me about, at least. I cast around for something to put my feet up on, but the low tables within reach all had fancy inlay or marquetry tops, and even I wasn’t uncouth enough to put my boots on something like that. So I just breathed out slowly and tried to stop all the little cogs in my brain from whirring, and just _be_. Tried to let the room tell me what it wanted about the boy who’d lived here once. Anthar. Hope. But if his spirit had ever lingered here it’d been scrubbed away by the cleaners and rubbed away by the polishers till there was nothing left. Wherever the prince was, it wasn’t here. There wasn’t a lot of point in me hanging around either, so I took the cable down the hill to the waterfront.


	3. The Big City

Havnor City, the largest city in the world. A million people were crammed into its six square miles, they said, though barely half appeared on the Ministry’s books. A million people, men and women, dark and pock, young and old, all working and sleeping and eating and drinking and pissing and shitting and gambling and whoring and thinking and dreaming in this little strip between the hills and the bay. It made my head spin just thinking about them.

The great city looked better in the dark. The night swallowed the Poxtown sprawl that crept further and further round the bay each year like crotch rot. The generator chimneys just looked like another clutch of towers in silhouette, and with the canals all lit up like a rhinestone tiara, you scarcely missed the stars. Even darkness couldn’t do a lot for the QSU buildings down near the waterfront. They were among the ugliest in the city, and these days that was an achievement. They squatted among the tall old townhouses of Queen’s Square like a bull terrier at a greyhound race. I wondered just how hideous Lebannen the Great’s queen had been to inspire the design, but she must have been in the ground fifty years before they went up. The architect had probably never laid eyes on the woman.

Chief Sedge had stationed four CHOPs on the main entrance. ‘It’s a serious offence to  imitate a CHOP,’ went a young joker whose name I didn’t know. I handed him my dog-eared bit of paper and got a kick out of watching them all snap to attention.

‘Sorry, sir,’ said the guy with the mouth.

‘Can’t be too careful what with…’ began the sergeant, but I let him talk to thin air and headed straight for the night porter’s cubby-hole, tucked under the double sweep of the main stairs.

‘Morning, old man,’ I said, though his age was hard to pin down: he might have been in his fifth decade as easily as his seventh. Use-names slipped off the man like quicksilver, and most just called him Master Porter. He knew more about university security than the security chief and more about the students than the admissions tutor. Best of all, he brewed a coffee, thick as harbour sludge, that’d make a packet as a sleep suppressant on the black market. It took no great skill in scrying to see it’d be an age before I got to hit the sack.

‘Master Bittern,’ he replied, his face crinkling into the broad smile that seemed to crack his face like an egg. ‘Or rather Officer Bittern. I’d ask what brings you here so early, but you’ll be wanting to know all about the young prince.’

The CHOPs had been told to keep the thing under wraps but word was bound to leak out, and probably sooner rather than later. In any case the old man had an uncanny knack of knowing everything that was going on across the city. It was why I came to him. I didn’t bother denying it, just sat myself down on his desk, shrugged off my damp cloak and glanced across at the coffee pot.

He got the hint. ‘Been a long night, has it?’ He puttered about the tiny room, measuring coffee and water into the pot and then setting it on the stove. The sharp smell of the stuff soon joined the scent of Sunreturn garlands. ‘He’s a nice lad, is Anthar. A bit too serious, perhaps. Prone to enthusiasms. Hardworking. Quiet. Not like his classmates. Half of them could beat the college washerwomen in a chattering competition.’

‘Any friends?’

‘Not many. Difficult on both sides, if you think about it. Lads that age don’t want to stand out. He did go around with a lad by the name of Sheluah. Another quiet one. But I haven’t seen him for, oh, it’d be six weeks or more now.’

With a mouthful like that for a moniker the boy had to be a pock. ‘Probably ran out of money. Or went back home. What about Malachite?’

‘They seem friendly enough, you know what they say about harrows and herrings. But seniors don’t mix much with the first years.’ The coffee pot began to bubble. He reached over my head for a clean cup and tipped out the pine needles. ‘And of course Malachite doesn’t honour us with a great deal of his time, these days. His skills lie in areas the college doesn’t teach.’ That was one way of putting it: the polite way. ‘Whereas Anthar…’

‘Gifted, is he?’ QSU was supposed to be reserved for those with at least a bit of talent in one of the magical arts but, as Malachite proved, royal blood had its own magic.

‘They didn’t tell you?’ The old man poured out two little cups of the dark liquid and handed me one. ‘A strong gift. Too early to tell where his true strength will lie though.’

I wrapped both hands around the cup and inhaled one long breath before taking the first sip. The stuff was both like and unlike the root. Coffee comforted but there was no forgetfulness in its spell. It set the mind free to wheel and soar but in this world not some other one. It was warm where hazia carried the chill of the grave. I took another sip. So the young prince had the gift, I thought. It was rare in pocks but not unknown. ‘A king with the gift,’ I said. ‘That’d set the cat among the palace pigeons.’

I was still trying to get my head around just how far the feathers might fly as I climbed up to the prince’s dorm. And up was the word: the first years were housed in the attics, up four flights of stairs. The sun was poking her nose above the horizon and the view might have been picture perfect but for the dawn fog rolling in off the harbour. As it was it took a compass to confirm the windows looked out over the sea. The room was as far from his suite up the palace as Hur-at-Hur from Havnor but it proved almost as much of a bust. Standard issue furniture, bed neatly made, nothing but uniform clothes in the wardrobe, nothing but lint in the pockets, nothing but textbooks on the bookshelf, nothing but bookmarks between the leaves, nothing but yesterday’s _Gazette_ in the bin. Nothing on the walls but plaster. Scarcely a quill out of place on the desk. The most interesting thing in the desk drawers was one of those ‘I climbed Mount Onn’ mugs they sold down the pier to tourists whose mountain experience was the sort you got from those telescopes on the terrace of the Mountain View tearooms back up on Palace Hill. It had a few map pins in the bottom and a portrait of his old man in copper. Unlike the dorm’s fifty previous occupants the prince hadn’t even bothered to carve his name into the desktop, unless he generally went by any of the fifty names schoolboys used for the kind of broad you bought by the quarter hour. He seemed to walk through the world like a ghost. And that was before he’d upped and disappeared.

I followed suit and headed away from the waterfront into the old town. The buildings got darker and more dilapidated with every block, faded paint giving way to fallen plaster, and the faces on the streets grew paler. I stopped off to get my sword out of hock. The guy behind the counter at the pawnshop was new. He made a fuss about changing my ivory piece until I waved my badge at him. His skin was like the underbelly of a mackerel, and he didn’t smell a whole lot sweeter. But he gave me an idea. I took a right and headed for a little bakery I knew on Half Moon Street. The baker’s wife had a sideline in doing portraits on the waterfront in summer, when the tourists were spawning. She’d knocked out a few missing person pictures for me in the past. And besides they made a mean fried egg in a bap.

I let Speedwell chunter on about how nice it was to see me carrying a sword again and how fine my shiny new badge looked and how thin I’d got and how their sandwiches would have me set to rights in no time, while her plump daughter put together my breakfast. Interrupting the woman only made her repeat herself. Luckily the daughter slapped a plate in front of me before Speedwell got stuck into her favourite subject of picking me out a nice girl to cuddle up to at nights. Some things were just too much on an empty stomach, and stone-cold sober to boot. She knew better than to talk while a customer was eating, so I snuck in ‘got a commission for you’ between bites. I wiped my greasy fingers on my cloak and fished out the miniature.

Speedwell hooked her eye-glasses over her nose and peered at the portrait. ‘But that’s Prince Hope,’ she said. ‘We’ve a dozen like it upstairs, if you want one. Ragwort’s got quite the collection, haven’t you, honey?’ Her daughter looked down at the floor. ‘Just run upstairs and…’ But the bell on the shop door tinkled and the girl skedaddled.

‘Can you do a picture of a boy with the prince’s features but skin and hair quite a bit paler?’ The porter had confirmed the princess’s description wasn’t just spite. ‘Anonymous street clothes, no identifying marks.’

‘Course I can, you know that. Have it done for you in a tick, soon as the early morning rush is over. But you mean some no-good _white_ – saving your ears, Master Bittern – is going round impersonating our prince?’

‘Let’s just say we’re trying to find a pock who looks like this but paler,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to take a trip to HQ but I’ll pick it up on my way out.’


	4. Too Many Princes

CHOP shared a place with CHOSS down by the Old Docks, five minutes from Half Moon Street and no more than half a mile from the university as the seagull flies across the bay. Lebannen the Great had obviously been hot on law enforcement because it was one of the biggest, grandest, most over-decorated buildings in a city full of big grand over-decorated buildings. The man seemed keen not to lose track of his peace rune again: it was spattered all over the place, starting with a bloody great thing cast in bronze right over the main entrance. The seagulls used it for target practice.

I hadn’t darkened HQ’s door since the day the chief had tossed me out on my arse. It wasn’t the kind of experience you want to repeat. But he’d ordered me to report before the first hour was told, so I quit stalling and hauled myself through the archway just as the city’s hundred and one clock-towers began to blare their tinny tune out into the morning smog. Once I was inside it wasn’t so bad. It was quieter for a start. A few folk stared as I went past but mostly everybody was too damn busy to care. The décor hadn’t changed much in five years and the smell, that hadn’t changed at all. By the time I got to the top floor to be greeted by the chief complaining I was late, it felt like I’d never left.

The chief hustled that prissy woman-lieutenant out of his office, shut the door behind her and leaned on it. He looked terrible. He’d raked his fingers so many times through his grizzled hair it’d started to come loose from its queue, and his eyes were red under their thick black brows. It seemed safe to assume the young prince was still top of Havnor City’s missing persons list.

‘Tell me you’ve nosed out something useful,’ he said.

I didn’t think ‘not really’ would cut much ice, so I ran through what little I had. It didn’t take very long. I held back my big surprise to the end but the prince’s gift was old news to the chief. ‘So Malachite’s got to be top of the list,’ I concluded. ‘No sign of him across the bay at QSU. His dorm hadn’t been slept in.’

‘The palace guards picked him up a couple of hours ago climbing over the arboretum wall.’ I knew the part he meant. I’d been over it myself once or twice in my time. ‘I interviewed him personally before I came down here, and if he had anything to do with it he’s a better actor than I am interrogator.’ The chief was actually a better interrogator than you’d think from his namby-pamby attitude to the whole violence and intimidation schtick. He had a gift for cutting straight to the heart, to what made people tick. ‘He was suitably embarrassed to admit he’d spent the entire night at the Jade.’

‘Embarrassed? Proud, more like.’ The Jade Dragon sold itself as a nightclub. They had tables and a little dance-floor sure enough, but up its fancy stairs folks danced to a different tune, if you get my drift. If its reputation was any guide they hired some of the more inventive broads in town, not that a man like me could afford a look in. ‘What is he, sixteen? Seventeen?’

The chief nodded. ‘Seventeen. And before that, at the time when the prince actually disappeared, he was over a mile away at the Little Theatre – which my men confirm – at what he called “an _avant garde_ reworking of the _Deed of the Young King_ ,” with, if you can believe it, Morred played by some Person of Kargish Heritage.’ The chief was the only man I knew who could spit that mouthful out with a straight face. ‘He claims his party included Prince Serpentine and the lords Bell and Raven.’ The keeper of the royal seal, the keeper of the keys and the head of the fleet. Quite a trio. ‘He’s friends with the playwright, apparently, and was hoping to squeeze some sort of municipal arts grant out of Lord Bell. We’ll have to check, of course, but if he’s suborned those three…’

‘You’d have a coup on your hands.’

‘And everything else seems quiet, thank Morred. Anyway, the story’s just too bizarre to make up.’ In my experience nothing was too bizarre to be made up, and a man like Malachite was bound to be skilled at spinning just the right blend of truth and lies to suit the ears of whoever was listening. ‘I’ve put in a formal request to the Ministry of Names for his logs, just to be on the safe side, on the grounds that he could be the next target. And if someone’s targeting the succession, he could well be.’

Malachite was only third in line to fill his grandpa’s boots, but his mother hadn’t set her dainty toes on Havnor Isle in years. That little royal problem fell squarely at the big flat feet of the officers of Hort Town.

‘Nothing says he didn’t hire someone,’ I said.

‘Nothing says _you_ didn’t hire someone. Nothing says _I_ didn’t hire someone. Nothing says anyone in the whole of Great Port didn’t hire someone.’ The chief was pacing up and down now, chopping the air with his hands in time with his words. ‘But the logs should help. If the Ministry agrees to hand them over.’

‘Will they?’

‘I’ve an appointment with Prince Serpentine as soon as he’s had his breakfast. If I can persuade him to support the request…’ He shrugged.

Serpentine had taken advantage of the king’s ‘indisposition’, as everybody always called it, to turn the keeper of the seal job into one of the most influential in the empire. The man was distantly related to the old queen, who’d been a princess in Shelieth before she was a queen in Havnor. The gossip columnists hinted he wanted an even closer relationship to the throne. They hinted at an awful lot of things in that kind of rag: you know the kind I mean, the kind best kept for wrapping round fish. Trouble was the things they hinted at usually turned out to be true.

‘Serpentine’s got to be on the list,’ I said. ‘Isn’t he making up to Coral?’

‘Everyone’s courting the royal princess. You’ve seen her. I’d be courting her if I weren’t almost twice her age.’ The chief could have been the subject of one of those sickly tales of marital bliss that crammed the pink pamphlets SPAM handed out on street corners and everybody else used for paper in the public toilets because they were too flimsy for wrapping fish. He’d been married to the same woman for close on four decades. I’d never met her but everybody who had agreed she was quite something.

The chief cut short his pacing and slumped down in a chair. ‘Let’s try another angle,’ he said. ‘Forget Coral. Forget Serpentine. Forget Malachite. Get back to the prince. Hope, I mean.’ This case had too damn many princes in it for my liking. ‘You know the story of his mother the queen?’

Everybody in the city knew _that_ story, but I wanted to hear the chief’s version. ‘Humour me,’ I went.

The chief shot me a look from under those bushy black brows of his. He knew exactly what game I was playing, and he was just desperate enough to play along. ‘The old queen dies leaving three daughters,’ he began. There was a hint in his voice of that old-fashioned sing-song tone people sometimes put on when telling the old tales. ‘The king is distraught. He … seeks consolation.’

‘Don’t beat around the bush, Sedge. He couldn’t keep his prick in his trousers. Everybody knows that.’

He ignored me. ‘Several of his mistresses fall pregnant, but only one is said to be carrying a son. His son. The king marries her.’

‘And despite all the pomp, everybody knows she started out as a scullery maid.’

‘Do they? I suppose so. It was just before Chief Sycamore retired. I read his notes. He decided against having all the kitchen staff executed to keep the thing quiet.’ The chief screwed his face up like someone had snuck a slice of lime into his warm milk. I didn’t think he was rueing the missed opportunity. ‘And five or so months later the royal prince is duly born.’

‘You know they say he’s named Hope because the king hoped he was his?’

The chief winced. ‘Another daughter follows. The palace gives out that the queen’s slow to recover. She’s never appeared in public much. And then they give out that she’s died.’ He glanced up at me. So this was the part he hoped I didn’t already know. ‘And they ship her back to Karego-At.’ The sing-song lilt had all leached out of his voice.

‘I’d heard that rumour. Along with the rumour she’d been poisoned.’ And the rumour she ran as mad as her husband the king, and a dozen more besides.

‘But the bit you won’t have heard – or at least I sincerely hope not – is that someone puts her at the prince’s nameday celebrations. A reliable witness. One of my best informers, in fact. He’s worked at the palace for decades. Swears it was her.’

I whistled. He was right, that I hadn’t heard. ‘Back from the dead. Neat trick if you can pull it off.’

‘I’ve got everyone I can spare downstairs combing through what the Ministry’s coughed up on the prince. They’ll be at it for days.’ He sighed. ‘That bunch of bureaucrats won’t give you the time of day when the trumpets are telling it, and now they’re emptying out their filing boxes by the cartload! I’ve requisitioned a couple of Patterners to make some sense from the stuff, but they haven’t shown up yet.’ He sighed again. ‘But at first glance the only thing that sticks out is that he’s been paying visits to the Kargish Quarter. Without his guards. Two or three times at least since his nameday.’

‘So you think he’s been slipping his leash to pop down into Poxtown and visit his mum, like a good little boy?’

‘Perhaps. It’s hard to tell. Scarcely anyone in that part of the city has been properly named. Including the queen.’ He glared at me. ‘Religious reasons they say.’

‘He could’ve just been buying _hereth_ spice,’ I said, mainly to change the subject. That was one tired old argument the two of us just hadn’t got time for this morning.

‘Or hazia-root.’ The chief hauled his bones out of the chair and propped himself by the window and stared out at the fog pressing against the pane as if it might give us all the answers if he only stared hard enough. He had the look of a man who wished his retirement party had been and gone. It was a bad look on a man who’d always loved his job.

‘I wish the Ministry had seen fit to inform me,’ he went after a while. ‘I could have had him followed. For his own safety, if nothing else.’

‘Did you tell them about the queen’s miraculous resurrection?’

It wasn’t a question he was meant to answer, and he didn’t. ‘Whatever the prince went in there for, someone might have recognised him. Followed him back.’

‘You’re thinking KLF?’

‘Or HFH. Or ARP. Or half a hundred others.’ He sighed yet again. ‘They’ve all got some sort of motive.’

The chief was right. Between the Kargish separatists who might want to do away with the heir to the throne in the name of self-governance from Awabath, the Havnorian xenophobes who’d do the same for the colour of his skin, the Poxtown crime syndicates out for ransom money to expand their line in hazia imports, and the Axis agents who might as well have come down from the moon for all anybody could ever fathom what they wanted, there was no shortage of suspects who didn’t have a drop of royal blood coursing through their veins. So why did my thoughts keep on turning back to Princess Coral?


	5. The Little Sister

It was dark. All about me trees were crashing to the ground. Great tall trees. Someone was chopping them down. Chop, chop, chop. Someone was knocking at the door. Knock, knock, knock. My head was on the desk. My new desk. I must have fallen asleep. The light hurt my eyes.

That lieutenant woman stuck her head round the door. ‘You decent?’ she went. I don’t know what she thought I might be doing and it’s lucky I didn’t speculate out loud, because the next thing out of that prim little mouth of hers was, ‘There’s a royal princess outside for you. I’ve tried telling her to wait for the chief to come back, but she’s insisting she’ll only talk to you.’

Must have made quite an impression last night, I thought. I laced my shirt up at the neck and fisted the sleep out my eyes and spat on my fingers and dragged them through my hair. The lieutenant stood there wearing a face like she’d got words stuck between her teeth. But it was an entirely different royal princess the broad showed in. Not much more than two-thirds Coral’s height, though that wasn’t saying as much as it might: the Princess Coral was almost as tall as I was. A pock kid, perhaps ten or eleven. Hard to tell she was so thin. She had rose-pink beads braided in her dull brown hair. The bits that poked out of her frilly pink dress had much the colour of onion skin, and all the fancy clothes in the capital couldn’t make an onion smell like an orchid. Must be the prince’s baby sister.

Got to admit the kid had balls though. She was raking me up and down just like I was raking her up and down. ‘You don’t look much like a hero,’ she said.

‘I’m no hero, princess.’

‘Father says you are.’

‘Just goes to show even kings aren’t always right.’ Surely even a kid this age had to understand her father’s wits had sailed west years ago? They’d be halfway to Selidor by now, I reckoned.

‘You _are_ Bittern, aren’t you?’

‘That’s what they call me. What can I call you?’

‘You may call me Pebble,’ she said, with the air of one granting a royal favour. Which I suppose she was. ‘Nearly everyone calls me that, except Coral.’

‘That what your name means?’ The real thing had so many syllables I thought it probably needed some sort of special permit to take it out for a spin.

‘No, _paíbanha_ ’s a kind of flower.’

‘I’ll bet it’s a pretty flower,’ put in the lieutenant. She’d hung around for some reason. Probably thought the princess needed a chaperone. ‘A pretty little flower for a pretty little girl.’

‘I’ve never seen one, they don’t grow in Havnor,’ the princess said coldly. I was beginning to warm to the girl. When she added, ‘you don’t need to stay now I’ve found Officer Bittern,’ I was ready to cheer and throw _paíbanha_ petals.

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I think I can handle one itty bitty princess all by myself.’

The lieutenant gave me a dirty look but she understood a royal dismissal as well as I did. When she’d gone, the princess said, ‘You don’t like her either. Good.’

I didn’t think explaining that the broad’s poncy accent got right up my nose was going to get the two of us very far. ‘So, Pebble,’ I said instead. ‘What was it you came down here to consult me about?’

‘I know something bad’s happened to my brother,’ she went, ‘but no-one will tell me what it is! My maid just clucks like she’s turned into one of the ducks in the gardens and my governess is nearly as bad. Coral says I’m too young to understand, and they won’t let me in to see Father. But I’m not too young to understand! I’m not! I’m not!’

Ten in ivory was beginning to look like small change. I hated these conversations even when the kid couldn’t have me imprisoned or exiled or executed if I made her cry. ‘Of course you’re not,’ I said. I waved her to a seat and dropped down to the floor beside her with my back against the wall and hoped she was too young to count just how many different ways her royal dignity had been offended. ‘Your brother the prince, Anthar—’

She giggled. ‘Anthar,’ she corrected. She pronounced the name the way everybody else did. I’d been going for her older sister’s version.

‘Your brother, Anthar … vanished, yesterday evening.’ I explained about the Ministry logs and how they could track people by their true name, especially anybody who’d been named by the Ministry. It was all supposed to be hush-hush but I figured the princess had a right to know. Fuck, everybody on the island had a right to know. The girl didn’t cry and she didn’t interrupt. ‘My guess is nobody’s told you anything because nobody has a clue what it means. It shouldn’t even be possible.’

‘So the Ministry can’t see me because I haven’t been named yet?’ The princess bounced out of the chair, pushed it under the window and knelt up on it with her pointy nose just shy of the glass. ‘They don’t know I’m here?’

I joined her. It was lucky we were both skinny because the window wasn’t very wide. There wasn’t much of a view. The sun was beginning to burn off the fog and you could see this cupboard they’d allocated me overlooked the central courtyard. It’d probably once enclosed a garden but the benches were snow white with seagull shit and the single tree was leafless all year round. Nobody ever went out there in my day, and it didn’t look like things had changed. ‘The name your mother gave you’ll work like clockwork till your naming day,’ I said. ‘But you’re only, what, twelfth in line to the throne?’

‘Thirteenth. And Pearl’s breeding again.’ She gave a little parody of a shudder. I wondered if it was copied from Coral. ‘She’s like a cat that has a litter every spring.’

It was probably treasonous even to think about that one. ‘Anyhow the men at the Ministry are very busy right now looking for your brother,’ I went instead. ‘They’ll all think you’re tucked up safely in the palace.’

‘I’m safer here with you,’ she said, twisting round to look up at me.

I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. Safer! With an old hazia-head like Bittern! I’d ask her where she got such a damn fool idea but I knew. The king thought I’d saved his life. I needed a drink.

I’d checked out the desk drawers for liquor earlier and there wasn’t anything else big enough to stash a bottle in. Either the room’s previous owner had been the single teetotal CHOP in history or he’d had chance to clear out all his booze before he left. I stuck my head out the corridor and hollered in the direction that lieutenant broad had disappeared and ordered up the canteen’s best stab at coffee and whatever baby princesses drank. Turned out the kid had got herself a taste for rushwash tea, of all things. Her nurse must have come from Gont or the Reaches or somewhere. Sedge had been born in some village up on the mountain and boasted he’d never lost his simple tastes, and even he couldn’t stomach that rot.

It came in delicate china cups with little painted roses on them. The equally delicate lacquered tray had lemon and honey and milk all laid out nicely like an old maid’s tea party. I couldn’t imagine where the cook had laid his hands on the stuff.

‘Ah, you drink _kahwa_ ,’ said the princess. ‘Father likes _kahwa_. He says it reminds him of mother. Anthar used to drink it with him—before he went to college, I mean.’ She spooned honey into her tea. ‘He says it tastes like mud.’ The slops the canteen had served up in the fancy cup might have tasted of mud, for all I could tell.

‘Tell me about the prince your brother,’ I said.

She put her cup down on the window ledge and climbed back onto the chair. ‘He’s my brother,’ she said. ‘Do you have a brother?’

‘Haven’t seen him in five years.’

‘Did he vanish too?’

‘None of your business, princess.’ I gulped down the rest of my coffee and put my empty cup down next to her full one. Carefully. The thing probably belonged to the cook’s old granny. ‘Your brother. Anthar. He doesn’t like coffee. What does he like?’ The princess kept her trap shut tight. But this wasn’t just some Poxtown kid taking the piss however pale her skin looked so I tried a few guesses to get her going. ‘Plays? Dances?’

She gave one sharp shake of her head so the beads on her braids snapped round and slapped her on the cheek.

‘Hunting?’

This time the beads made like those bead curtains over the entrance to the back room when the dealer’s just cut off your credit.

‘Not hunting then,’ I said when I could get a word in over all the click-clacking.

‘He likes riding in the forest, in among all the trees,’ she started, and once she’d started like a true woman she just didn’t stop. ‘He likes trees. I like the sea better. We’re never allowed to swim in the bay, only in the shallow little pool in the gardens. It’s boring. And we’re never allowed to go out sailing on our own, or when the wind whips up the waves. He wants to learn to work the weather so we’ll always be safe.’ She picked up her cup and put it down again.

‘Anything else he wants to learn?’

‘Healing. Because of Father.’ So the kid did know. ‘But I think his favourite subject might be history. He likes names and dates and lists and those genie-things. And he’s always talking about all the great mages in the songs, the ones who sailed round the world and talked to dragons. My governess says there never were any mages or any dragons, it’s all just that meta-thingy. You know. Where something exciting really means something dull. But Anthar thinks they really lived, just like the tales say.’ She picked up her tea again, for real this time. I kept my mouth shut and let the kid’s mind work. She was never going to compete with her elder sister in the looks department but I was beginning to wonder whether she’d inherited the same brains. ‘He wants to be a mage when he grows up, I think. He’s got a lot of power, you know.’ I nodded but she was still looking out the window. The thinning fog smeared the sun, pale as milk, across half the sky. ‘Do you think he could somehow have tricked the Ministry’s tracking thing?’

I’d been wondering the same thing. A kid with a big gift and an even bigger yen to be anyone except the heir to the throne and anywhere except the big city. ‘It’s not supposed to be possible.’

‘Then how did it happen?’

‘You’ve hit the thousand gold piece question right on the head there, kiddo.’

‘I think he might have known about it, the tracking thing.’ And here it was, the reason little Princess Pebble had tripped all the way down here in her shiny princess shoes. There always was one and it nearly always fell out if you waited long enough. The chief said folks just wanted to tell the truth and you just had to have the patience to listen. ‘When I last saw him he said not to trust anyone. He went on and on about some big conspiracy or other. I don’t know. I can’t remember. I wasn’t really listening properly. He was always going on about something. Whale hunting. Trees dying. You know.’

I didn’t. Nobody I knew cared a damn about whales or trees. ‘Did he mention names? Prince Malachite?’

‘Oh, no! Mal’s his friend. When he first came I didn’t like him much. But he knocked down some boys who called Anthar names while they were practising net-ball together, and then they were friends. You don’t suspect _him_ , do you?’

To my mind it felt a bit fishy everybody going out their way to give young Malachite alibis and testimonials. But I could afford to let him lie for now. The thing about fish was the stink only got worse the longer it rotted.


End file.
